How to use Smartly: the setup steps, and who it fits

Short answer: you don't sign up for Smartly and start. Its homepage offers a demo and a login, and its login guide begins from an email invitation. Once you are in, the setup Smartly describes runs in five steps: connect your ad accounts, build campaign blueprints in Workspaces, feed them from a spreadsheet or product feed, launch, then let Predictive Budget Allocation move budget while you read the results in Smartly's reporting. It is built for teams running many ads across many channels.

I work on Everix, a Meta ads tool, so weigh the last section with that in mind. How Smartly works comes from Smartly's public knowledge base at docs.smartly.io, read on October 17, 2026; most detailed pages there need a login, so this covers what is public. The contract figures come from Vendr's buyer data, read on October 16, 2026. If you were looking for Smartly the payroll software at smartly.co.nz, that is a different company in New Zealand.

Can you sign up for Smartly yourself?

No. The homepage has a demo button and a login, and no sign-up form. Smartly's login guide starts from an email invitation; there is no step where you create an account on your own. Prices aren't published either: Vendr's buyer data puts the median Smartly contract at $90,000 a year and the lowest reported at $25,500, about $2,125 a month before any ad spend. Two practical limits come next. Smartly only supports Google Chrome, and someone on your side needs full Admin access to every ad account you connect.

Step 1: Connect your ad accounts

Smartly needs permission to create, preview and publish ads, read analytics and manage catalogs in every channel you use. Each channel gets an Ad Account Authorizer: a person with full Admin access to the ad accounts, who connects them to Smartly and manages pixels there. For Meta, connecting the ad account and adding your Facebook Pages are two separate steps. Smartly runs Meta campaigns for all six objectives, from awareness to sales, in single image or video, carousel, collection, existing post and Advantage+ formats.

Step 2: Build campaign blueprints in Workspaces

Workspaces is where Smartly builds Meta campaigns in bulk and shows campaigns from several ad accounts in one view. Its structure advice is worth following in any tool: keep the same campaigns and ad sets running for a long time and refresh them by pausing old ads and adding new ones, run one campaign per objective, and give a change five or more days before you judge it. Rebuilding campaigns every few days throws away the history Meta's delivery has learned from.

Step 3: Feed it from a spreadsheet or product feed

Smartly's automation runs on feeds. You connect your blueprints to an automation feed, usually a Google Sheet or a product feed, and Smartly creates campaigns, ad sets and ads from its rows, so a handful of blueprints can produce many campaigns. Its public example feeds cover Advantage+ shopping campaigns, catalog carousels and collection ads, dynamic creative, bid multipliers and boosting organic posts. Image and video templates sit on top: they apply to catalog products or regular ads and can pull fields such as the sale price straight from the catalog.

Steps 4 and 5: Launch, then let budget move

After launch, Smartly's workflow sets up Predictive Budget Allocation, which raises or lowers spend across the campaigns you select based on ad performance. Triggers switch ads on or off from any data you can put in a feed: stock levels, weather, time of day or performance. The last step in Smartly's own guide is to read results in its reporting and "manually optimize if necessary." Someone on your team still decides what to change and why.

What Smartly support will and won't do

Support is a chat inside the app, open around the clock, in English by preference. It answers product questions and investigates delivery problems, and Smartly says plainly that it won't build your campaign strategy. Training goes through the Smartly Academy and your customer success manager, who also handles billing.

Using Smartly for Black Friday

Smartly's holiday guide holds up for any store, on Smartly or not:

• Finish creative templates several days before the sale; every channel processes ads more slowly in peak season.
• Skip countdown timers in image templates. Each change to the image sends the product back into review, and it can stop delivering for hours or days.
• Put deal prices in the catalog's sale price field with a sale effective date, instead of overwriting the regular price.
• Give catalogs at least a month of history before the sale.
• Check the ad account's spending limit 3 to 5 days out so delivery doesn't stop on the day.

Meta's side of the timing, when the learning phase needs to be over before the sale, is in when to start advertising for Black Friday, and 352 live Black Friday Meta ads shows what stores are already running.

Who Smartly fits

• Built for: brand, performance and creative teams, and agencies, running many ad versions across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Google and programmatic, where producing ads faster is worth a five-figure contract.
• Not built for: a store running one or two Meta campaigns on a few thousand dollars a month. The lowest reported contract, about $2,125 a month, is more than many of those stores spend on ads. Smartly alternatives for a small store compares the tools priced for that.

What Everix does here

Everix watches each campaign around the clock and judges it on complete days of data, against the target cost you set, and makes the calls a media buyer would: whether an ad is tired or the idea behind it has run out, which country or placement is spending without sales, and which winner has earned more budget. It pauses proven losers on its own and writes down why; more budget or a targeting change waits for your yes. You connect your Meta ad account yourself, with no demo or contract. It runs Meta only, for a flat monthly fee by spend band: $49 up to $1,500 a month and $199 up to $5,000, with a 7-day free trial.